Iran Has Another Path To The Bomb. Trump Needs To Close It Off.

There's more than one way for Iran to get a bomb. America needs to close off all the options. (Photo credit should read VAHID REZA ALAEI/AFP via Getty Images)

AFP via Getty Images

There’s no shortage of criticism these days of the way the Trump administration chose to end the conflict with Iran – via a fourteen-point Memorandum of Understanding that has left the Iranian regime standing, hardened internally and strengthened in terms of its regional political position. Still, to hear the White House tell it, the process will be a strategic victory in the longer run, because it paves the way for a lasting solution to Tehran’s persistent nuclear ambitions.

Here, though, there’s reason for worry, since the Trump administration’s approach at present only offers a partial solution.

So far, at least, U.S. engagement has focused overwhelmingly on the most visible and widely-discussed way by which Iran might develop a nuclear weapon – by enriching uranium. It overlooks a second, equally potent route: plutonium reprocessing. Notably, Iran’s regime has demonstrated the technical capability to do both, as well as a long track record of deception on the nuclear front that suggests it will pursue that pathway as well if given the chance.

At the heart of Iran’s plutonium option is the nuclear power plant situated in the southern port city of Bushehr. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear agency, helped build the facility, subsequently administering it for years before turning over control to the Iranian regime. In the process, Moscow provided Tehran with the technical foundation to jumpstart its atomic advances – and a veneer of legitimacy for its persistent will to nuclear power.

Now, after three decades of operation, Bushehr has generated a substantial stockpile of spent nuclear fuel. Henry Sokolski, a leading nuclear expert who runs the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, has estimated that today Iran “probably has roughly 2,100 kilograms of weapons-usable plutonium” at Bushehr, which is enough material “to make more than 200 bombs.”

The Iranian regime, moreover, is exceedingly capable of doing so. As Sokolski explains, the technical steps needed to convert plutonium into bomb cores are not fundamentally more difficult than those involved in weaponizing uranium. Both involve turning the material into metal, casting it, and machining it into a usable core. The key difference lies in the process for converting the fissile material to be bomb usable (chemical reprocessing in the case of plutonium, rather than enrichment, which can be done covertly and in small batches). Moreover, the timeline for doing all this is roughly analogous as well – a matter of weeks, once the fissile material is in hand.

The key difference, then, lies in accessibility. A great deal of Iran’s stockpile of highly-enriched uranium – most directly, the much-discussed 440 kilograms of near-weapons grade “nuclear dust” – is now deeply buried, dispersed or destroyed as a result of U.S. and Israeli air strikes on key regime facilities last year. By contrast, Iran’s plutonium stockpile is situated in spent-fuel pools at Bushehr, making it far easier to divert on short notice.

This isn’t a hypothetical concern. It represents a structural weakness of the current Memorandum, which risks fixating on uranium enrichment while leaving other development pathways open, much like the Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal did. Put another way, no matter how fruitful the coming negotiations between Washington and Tehran turn out to be, Bushehr’s plutonium leaves the Iranian regime with the means to build a potential “bomb in the basement,” if it decides to do so.

Preventing that from occurring is going to require concrete action. Sokolski makes the case that Iran’s plutonium pathway needs to be closely monitored via “near real time” surveillance instead of the current, comparatively limited approach employed by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear watchdog. He also argues that Iran’s spent fuel needs to be removed from Iranian custody, so the regime’s nuclear specialists simply don’t have the raw material needed to activate a plutonium route. Finally, he says, current plans for additional construction at Bushehr should be derailed, so the stockpile the U.S. still needs to address doesn’t grow bigger still.

It’s advice well worth heeding. The Iranian regime has made its atomic ambitions abundantly clear, and has funneled enormous resources into this project over the past several decades. Logic therefore dictates that American policy needs to deny it every pathway for turning those aspirations into a weapon – not simply the most obvious one.